Personal Training

Personal Training

Some of us struggle with losing weight and being in a good shape. Also, only a few of us know how to achieve the desired result. Well, now it is time to know. Did you know that there are great personal trainers at SNU? If you need their help to set a goal, write exercises for you and help you with nutrition, you can ask them. One of them is Alec Laffoon, who explains a successful way to achieve a healthy body.

There are a lot of challenges and aspects along the road that everyone may face. There are differences in workouts for women and men. First of all, there is a difference in body structure. For instance, men have testosterone, which changes a lot in the nutrition and exercising for men compared to women. Women are more petite, and there is not as much they can do to gain muscles but get fit.

“Many of us mistakenly think that physical activity is the main tool for weight loss, but in fact, only 30% of success in weight loss depends on exercising and the other 70% of success is all about what we eat,” said Alec Laffoon, student at SNU and personal trainer at Rockwell Plaza YMCA.

Advice from Laffoon is that first of all it is necessary to set a goal. It is very important to know what you want and work toward it. Next advice would be to have a workout written down on the paper. Many of us, who never workout, beginners or even those who are athletes, might “get lost” in a gym. The reason for that is we don’t have a workout written down and there is a great variety of equipment at gyms. After goals are set, there is time to write the workout down day by day.

Watch out women of late dinners. It is important to remember that one proverb says that you need to eat breakfast as a queen, lunch you need to share with a friend and dinner give to an enemy. One of the reasons for weight gain among women is eating late meals. In order to avoid it, don’t eat after 7 p.m.

For the first month it might be enough to visit a gym about 3 to 5 times per week to let your body kind of get used to the exercising. However, after 4 to 8 weeks, the body will adjust to the same exercises, and they will need to be changed up to keep seeing results.  Also, 3 sets of exercising would be most appropriate for the beginners.

Another thing that you need to be aware of is metabolism, which is purely individual. Men’s metabolism is most likely faster than women’s. For instance, we can witness a man who doesn’t have time for workouts and loses weight, and at the same time a woman gains it. If you have a slow metabolism, it is not is the end of the world because there are ways to speed it up. The way to do so would be eating 6 meals throughout the day. Attention, whenever choosing 6 meals you need to make sure that each meal is not as big as it could be with 3 meals a day. For example, here is the schedule for a day that you might use for yourself.

Approximately, the time for breakfast would be from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m. You may choose to eat oats, fruits and water. Then, the time for the first snack is around 10 a.m. and it might be fruit, which gives you natural sugar, or a protein shake. Then, it is time for lunch. Grilled chicken, spinach, and rice would be a perfect meal for lunch. After that, the next meal would be a protein shake around 3 p.m. Finally, it is time for dinner, and basically it might look like lunch and include meat, greens and water.

“I would like to see the service of personal trainers here at SNU,” said Karina Kotova, junior at SNU.

Would you like having such a service here at Southern Nazarene University? Would you think it would be beneficial? It would definitely be a good idea to have this service to help those who struggle with this and get qualified help from professionals.

One of the main challenges that people face on the way to a healthy body is getting motivated and eating healthy. It is never too late to change your habits. Eating healthy and exercising is more expensive, but it is worth it.

[author image=”http://echo.snu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Echo-headshot.jpg” ]Marina Shipliova, Staff Contributor
Marina is from Russia. She has been playing tennis for 15 years. She loves sports, hiking, swimming, jumping, skiing and etc. She studying is cultural and communication studies.  She describes herself as a super senior. [/author]